Westinghouse Elektro

Elektro, also called Elektro the Moto-Man, was a humanoid robot built by Westinghouse Electric Corporation and shown at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Westinghouse engineers J. M. Barnett, Jack Weeks Sr. and Harold Gorsuch built it with an aluminum body over an electromechanical mechanism. IEEE Spectrum gives its height as 2.1 m and its weight as 118 kg.

Elektro's control was electromechanical. Spoken commands became electrical pulses through a grid-glow tube, and a photoelectric cell in a separate control unit triggered a bank of 48 relays. The robot did not understand words; it responded to timed syllable patterns. It could move its arms and fingers, turn its head, distinguish red from green and play back recorded speech.

Elektro was advertised as walking, but concealed rollers moved it along a track while its leg mechanism simulated a step. It later appeared at Pacific Ocean Park and in the film Sex Kittens Go to College. The original robot is part of the Mansfield Memorial Museum's collection. The similarly posed Elektro and Sparko shown in the freely licensed Heinz History Center photograph are modern replicas, not the originals.